“He’s a really awesome guy, and everyone’s going to miss him,” a friend, Misty Dawn Yanish, of St. Cloud, Minn., said. Yanish, who has a Web log in which she describes her life with cerebral palsy, said Allen was a couple of years ahead of her at Maple Lake High School and was always nice to her.

“He was one of those people who always said ‘hi’ and asked how I was doing,” she said.

She wrote on her blog that he “loved what he was doing for us over there” and was to be coming home in about a month.

In December, Allen was featured in a Marine publicity photo while on patrol in Anah, 150 miles northwest of Baghdad. Then a corporal, he was identified as a crewman with a light armored vehicle.

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